Expanding my Web of Trust
I’ve persuaded my father into creating a key-pair for use with GnuPG. And because I’m such a trustworthy guy, he has signed my key :-)
It isn’t that easy to find somebody who uses GnuPG or PHP. In fact there’s only a little over 11,000 Danish keys on the public keyserver www.pgp.dk.
Anyway — I’ve started using the latest development version of my mail and newsreader Gnus. The development version is called Oort Gnus. The reason I switched from Gnus 5.8.8 was, that Oort Gnus has much better support for what is known as S/MIME. This is the format MUAs like mutt uses.
When using S/MIME, the first part in the mail has a Content-Type of
application/pgp-encrypted
. Then follows the encrypted text in a MIME
part with a content-type of application/octet-stream
. It’s the first
part that tells Oort Gnus that it should be
prepared to decrypt the message. Gnus 5.8.8 didn’t
understand this, and was further confused by the application/octet-stream
part which it (of course) didn’t think was text. But it works now: I can
encrypt and decode mails, and verify signatures from others. If I’m
missing a public key, then it will be fetched automatically.
Martin Geisler:
I’ve since switched to a new key and have attended a keysigning party where I collected lots of signatures.
1 July 2005, 9:32 pm